What is actually slowing your business down, and how do you know?

Ask any owner what is holding the business back and the answer comes immediately. Market conditions. Staff quality. Competition on rate. Not enough enquiries.

The speed of the answer is worth noticing. It means the answer has been given before, many times, and it has probably not been examined for a while.

That matters, because a business can spend years solving the wrong problem extremely well.

Three questions that test the answer

First: what would have to be true for this to be the real reason? If the problem is not enough enquiries, then your conversion from enquiry to order should be healthy. Is it? If half your enquiries never get a quotation, the shortage is not of enquiries.

Second: when did you last check? Many of these answers were formed in a different year, under different conditions, and have simply been carried forward.

Third: who else would say the same? Ask the person who handles enquiries and the one who handles deliveries what is holding the business back. If they name something different from you, that gap is the most useful thing you will learn this month.

Why the real answer is usually duller

Owners tend to name external causes, because those are visible and dramatic. The market, the competitor, the economy.

When businesses actually examine it, the constraint is usually internal and boring. Replies are slow. Nobody follows up twice. Collection takes too long so there is no money to buy stock. The owner is the bottleneck for approvals.

That is good news, even though it does not feel like it. You cannot do anything about the market. You can do something about every item on that second list, starting this week.

Write your answer down. Then ask two people in your business the same question and compare.

Finding the real constraint, rather than the one everybody repeats, is the first hour of every job we take on. Tell us what you and your two people said and we will tell you what the gap usually means.